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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Great news -- Ireland is another country in bad need of reforesting. The British took all our trees to build their navy and Irish farmers finished off what little remained. We have very few old growth forests as a result.

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> The British took all our trees to build their navy and Irish farmers finished off what little remained.

That's something of a myth. Most of the deforestation in Ireland occurred long before the plantations (even BCE). While trees were cut for shipbuilding, deforestation was primarily the result of agriculture and a booming population pre-famine.

https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-topics/...

> long before the plantations (even BCE)

Iceland wasn't settled by humans until the Viking age, in the 9th century CE. Are you claiming it was deforested a millennia earlier than that?

Edit: I'm an idiot, I misread your comment. Apologies!

This subthread is about Ireland, not Iceland.

OP is talking about Ireland, where there have been people for thousands of years.

There's similar myth where Venetians chopped down trees from Croatian coast, namely Dalmatia and Velebit mountain. It's just nonsense

Your link greatly understates later human (predominantly British people) impact from 1500 onwards:

https://www.forestryservices.ie/history-of-forestry-in-irela...

Basically my opinion is that we should be allowed to mess up our own island but another country messing with our island is a crime and infringement of our sovereignty. So yea -- thumbs up to Neolithic farmers trying to make ends meet vs a thumbs down to a global Empire bent on taking over the world through it's military navy.

I’m no fan of British rule in Ireland, but your own link states that deforestation under British rule was primarily for agricultural land, not ship building.

It’s better to have legitimate complaints when making a criticism of the British empire. There’s plenty of them.

It would help if we didn't have a cultural dislike of trees. I'm getting tired of "You'll be wantin' to cut them trees down for light" when people see my house.

My parents had a similar thing in Scotland. They have a big garden, a conservatory and a lovely sea view. They chopped down a lovely conifer (I forget which kind, just remember it had needles) to get more of a sea view, a pear tree that just needed some love and another that shaded the driveway but apparently made the cars hard to clean. This happened when I was away at university, I came back and thought that there'd been a storm or something. Really weird.

That said, there's a difference between reforesting efforts the countryside and (stupidly) cutting down a couple of trees in your garden. Scotland and Ireland are I think similarly deforested after previously having been nearly covered in it. There are reforestation efforts in Scotland, though I don't think we'll see a huge difference within my lifetime :(

edit: ok it's maybe less negative than I thought, Wikipedia thinks we've jumped from 5% forested to 17% since the ~1950s.

I wonder how much of that 17% is native species? Nothing wrong with wood farms of course but it's a point of contention here that the government calls a bunch of monoculture spruce from Alaska part of its reforestation efforts.

I can't imagine chopping down a lovely conifer. We have a dozen ~20 meter tall trees in a row and our neighbours sounded almost annoyed we didn't chop them down with the rest that we had to fell when building our house. It killed us to lose the ones we did. Mind you we're on 3 acres; we're not shading anyone else.

I have a couple hundred saplings growing, fingers crossed I have a nice starter forest in a decade or so.

I'm afraid I don't know, but you're right if it was all (or mostly) non-native it's maybe not quite worth celebrating. Your little future forest sounds great though!

The problem with that increase since the fifties is that it's mostly not 'real' forest but plantations, which are their own kind of desert. I don't know if you've ever tried to venture into one but.. it's not fun. Very dense. Very little of nature about them.

To be fair they're not native forest but I quite like a dense, dark forest. It reminds me of forests from home (which is fitting since it's a North American species).

Oh, no - I mean the monoculture is so densely planted together that it's a literal struggle to even make your way through. These are not the deep dark forests of yore that threaten Hobbits...!

Hah, maybe that's why my 4 year old likes it (harder to chase her!) Random example would be Lough Boora which has a sitka spruce plantation and they're somewhere around 2 meter spacing I think, though they're mature so at ground level you don't have too many branches in your face.

I haven't been back for a while, but I remember seeing a few little geometrically simple islands of thick woodland in a sea of farmland. So it's mostly that? Shame

I can imagine hearing that over and over again can get quite tiring. I'm planting trees all over my house to create more shade. Ambient light coming through the windows is good enough for me.

I don’t know how cultural that is. In the aggregate, humans seem to enjoy sunlight. If a house is in the middle of the woods, I imagine there’s a subset of human who would prefer that but not so much the general population over a large time span.

EDIT: though the lighting would probably be awesome for TV viewing or gaming… it’s important to remember that if the house is sticks and siding with asphalt covered shingles, there’s an increased maintenance burden and security risk from having a ton of trees close to the house.

If it matters, the culture I grew up in (central California) very much valued trees because of the shade they offered, as well as their beauty.

Trees shade is great in hot weather.

Fortunately Ireland is plagued by neither sunlight nor hot weather.

Considering the moaning caused by 30C I think we're in for a rough few centuries...

My street is lined with trees that (in summer at least) provides great cover from rain, you can walk the whole ~200m down it without getting wet. Maybe that's a more convincing selling point for Ireland :)

One of my earliest memories of my Irish grandad was him cutting down a tree in our back garden.

Actually most of Ireland was deforested in the Neolithic age. We really should reforest as much as possible, preferable native species.

It was said that a squirrel could travel from one end of Ireland to the other without ever touching the ground as more than 80% of the land was covered by forests

https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-topics/...

It would be interesting to see how this contrasts to other European countries. At a glance up to 1600 or so the history seems the same as other densely populated countries: dense forests made way for more and more farmland. "By 1600, less than 20% of Ireland was covered by forests." For comparison, both Germany and France are about 30% forest today. But where Ireland lost almost all woodlands by 1900, apparently driven by wood demand, Germany and France maintained forests for game hunting and developed sustainable foresting around the 1800s.

That's what Trees for Life are doing in the Scottish Highlands:

https://treesforlife.org.uk/

I think that Ireland was largely deforested in prehistory by early settlers. Short cycle rotation cropping of Sitka spruce is about all that's been done about it in independent Ireland.

> The British took all our trees to build their navy

Not only that, they took our young men to fight in their colonial armies; and deracinated the educated to serve as middeling officials in their colonial governments!

Anyway, I'm being ironic, the Irish were part of the colonial project as much as working class factory workers were in Manchester were.

Some interesting replies to your comment. As you included an interesting sentence claiming the trees were taken by the British I just wanted to ask what your thoughts on that were now?

I think you may have misread the title as ireland instead of iceland.

>Ireland is another country

is another.

No, not a misread

Seems like I misread it then. Thanks for pointing it out.

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